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Liberation from slavery - the power of collective action

Producing video stories for IFAD, I have visited
many projects in different countries and I have heard some astounding stories
of how life has changed for people after project interventions. But in India, I
heard one of the most powerful and moving stories that I have come across – a
story about liberation from slavery.

There are twelve hundred
fishermen who live in Aruacottuthurai village on the Tamil Nadu coast. They say that for most of their lives, they have lived as slaves. Every one of them was in debt to moneylenders – a debt most had
inherited from their fathers. In an intricately corrupt system, the
moneylenders, the local traders and village leaders were all in cahoots, ensuring that it was
impossible for the fishermen to ever pay back what they owed. I spent my time
with fisherman Bharathi Dasan. He inherited a debt of 50,000 rupees (about $800) from his father.
Like all the fishermen here, each day he would spend a minimum of 12 hours at
seaand, when he returned to shore, he had to hand over his entire catch to the
moneylenders. The traders conspiring with them would set the price far below
market value. Bharathi was not allowed to trade with anyone else or pay off the
entire loan when he had a bumper catch.“We shed tears,” he told me.“Even though I was going out to sea every day, I didn’t have
a happy and peaceful life because on the shore I didn’t get a good price for my
fish and I couldn’t feed my family. If it kept going like this what would
happen to our village and our people? We were very sad to think of our future
in this village.”

In 2004, this situation was compounded
by the tsunami which destroyed the fishermen’s boats and nets and halved their catch.
Bharathi’s wife Durga
Lakshmi described their
endless cycle of debt to me: “We didn’t have money
for our expenses. So we borrowed more money with interest. Our child fell sick
so we had to take her to the hospital. We didn’t have money so we had to borrow
it. This is suffering.”

Meanwhile, after the tsunami, the IFAD-funded
Post-Tsunami Sustainable Livelihoods Programme for the Coastal Communities of
Tamil Nadu (PTSLP) was set up. As the Project Director, Vikram Kapur, explained: “We realised there are enough projects to look after the
rehabilitation of the affected people but since the tsunami and other natural
calamities are actually endemic to coastal communities it would be better if we
could come out with a strategy that would give them sustainable livelihoods and
ensure that they are able to withstand such kinds of shocks.” Therefore,
ending this crippling cycle of debt became a priority for the project.

Working with the NGO South Indian
Federation of Fishermen’s Societies, the project encourages fishermen to form
Fish Marketing Societies (FMS) and it provides the FMS with the initial capital
to pay off the entirety of their members’ debts to the moneylenders, which the fishermen
then slowly pay back. Three years ago, Bharathi joined one of these Societies, which
has now appointed its own auctioneers. Every day I saw at least
fifty merchants bidding for the daily catch. When I was there, Bharathi had a
bumper catch and was delighted with the price he received for it. He was also
happy to pay over a certain percentage of this money to his FMS to pay off what
he owed on his debt, to pay insurance and the Society management fees. Since
selling his catch through the FMS, his income has
gone up by 30 per cent. He has bought a second boat and now has four crewmen
working for him. He’s been able to build an extension to his home and he sends
his three children to private school. “I was
liberated from the slavery life. I feel very happy. I now have peace of mind,”
he told me.

I was really struck by the power of
the group and how, by working collectively, they could resolve a situation that
they could never have tackled as individuals. One of the project staff likened
it to moving a big boulder. When you try to do it on your own, it doesn’t budge
and you’re likely to hurt yourself. When you push it as a group, the boulder
can be moved wherever you wish.

“Previously we were like slaves,” the President of the FMS, Murugaiyan Manivannan told me. “Now we have freedom in selling and we are getting a good price for our hard work. It is only
possible due to our unity.”

The fishermen in this village are now free, but hundreds more fishermen along this coast are still in the clutches of the money-lenders. The project has already helped set up 37 Societies so far and 13 more are
planned over the next two years.